Ray
says he became captivated with science fiction at the
age of eight at the 1939 New York World's Fair. "I
was just there one day, but that was the most important
day of my life because before that I was not a science
fiction fan and after that day I was". After that,
he began reading science fiction and fantasy novels
voraciously, and became a science fiction fan and cartoonist.

In
the 1950s, he moved to Paris, where he met Allen Ginsberg,
Gregory Corso and William Burroughs among others of
the Beat Generation, as well as existentialists Jean Paul Sartre, Boris Vian and Simone de Beauvoir. He subsequently co-edited Miscellaneous
Man, the first "Beatnik" little literary
review. In Paris, he worked with Michael Moorcock smuggling
Henry Miller books out of France. It was also in France
where he met and married Kirsten Enge, a Norwegian girl,
and where his son Walter was born.

Ray,
Kirsten and the webmaster (not a recent photograph)

After
returning to the US with his new family in the
early '60s, he published his first work of fiction,
the short story Turn off the Sky.

In
1967, he published his first novel, The Ganymede
Takeover in collaboration with Philip K. Dick.

Numerous
books and short stories have followed. His book
Blake's Progress, in which the poet William
Blake and his wife are travelers in space and
time, has been his greatest critical success.
His short story 8 O'Clock in the Morning,
was turned into the comic book story Nada,
and Nada was made into the paranoid cult
classic They Live in 1988. This John Carpenter
film has shown remarkable staying power.

His
greatest claim to fame, however, he says, is as
inventor of the propeller beanie while still in
high school. Says Ray, "Centuries after all
my writings have been forgotten, in some far corner
of the galaxy, a beaniecopter will still be spinning."

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